Wednesday, April 01, 2009

First to Report March Numbers, Continental Shows Another Slump

Continental Airlines is the first to report its March operational numbers, and they show a continuing slump that no doubt will be echoed as other major airlines report in in the next few days.

Passenger traffic, as measured by revenue passenger miles (one paying passenger flown one mile) dropped 9.7 percent (down 12.4 percent domestically and down 7.5 percent internationally) compared with March 2008. Reflecting the trouble the whole industry has had in not being able to reduce capacity fast enough to address the falloff in demand, Continental's available seat miles were off 6.4 percent -- down 11.4 percent domestically and down 2.3 percent internationally.

If you think the planes still seem full, you're right. Continental's domestic load factor was 84.3 percent, down a mere 0.9 points from last March. Load factors of over 80 percent mean most flights are taking off packed full. The international load factor was 75.8 percent, down 4.2 points.

Revenues are off sharply. In March, Continental's revenue per available seat mile fell 19.5 percent compared to March 2008, following an 11.5 percent drop in February.

Bio

Joe Sharkey's work appears in major national and international publications. For 19 years until 2015 he was a weekly columnist for the New York Times. He is now a weekly travel and entertainment columnist with the global website Travel.Buzz, as well as an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, He has written five books, four non-fiction and a novel, one of which is in development as a movie. Previously, he was an assistant national editor at the Wall Street Journal and a reporter and columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
On Sept. 29, 2006, he was one of seven people on a business jet who survived a mid-air collision with a 737 over the Amazon. All 154 on the 737 died. His report on the crash appeared on the front page of the New York Times and later in the Sunday Times of London magazine.
He and his wife Nancy (who is a professor of journalism at the University of Arizona) live in Tucson with horses and parrots. He is working on a new novel about an international travel writer who hates to travel.
"JoeSharkey.com" is Copyright (c) 2006-2015 by Joe Sharkey.